Which type of wood particulate is suspected of being endocrine disruptive and is being found bioaccumulating in the reproductive organs of ~every organism on earth?
Good response if the argument was natural == good, but it's not. Lighting coal on fire is also bad. Coal didn't suddenly zap into existence and then to global prevalence in air, food, and water within decades.
The argument is that burying things like plastics in a landfill is better than natural equivalents. Which you still seem impossibly locked into ignoring.
Tannins, when they first were evolved, almost certainly. And they still are used by plants to kill pests, albeit it’s steadily been losing effectiveness and the typical biological arms race has been going on a long time.
Again, I’m not saying plastics are awesome or perfect or whatever, and there aren’t problems.
I’m pointing out that if you think ‘putting it in a hole in the ground’ is somehow worse than the ‘natural’ solutions that’s ridiculous.
Especially since ‘letting it sit where it was made and have things eat it’, or ‘accumulate in a hole until it gets buried’, or ‘get washed into a swamp or the ocean and accumulate until they get eaten, subducted, or broken down’ is a classic natural way for waste to be handled in nature. And there are plenty of natural things that are super nasty that this literally happens with all the time, and kills lots of stuff.
And nature regularly has huge die offs, poison events like red tides, etc. from purely natural causes. So clearly this isn’t a ‘solved problem’ in nature.
If we even had a single event like that for humans related to plastics (or even an identifiable single event in animals where we could see it), we’d be having a very different discussion.
If you were arguing for literally not producing plastic at all, then it might be a different discussion - but that seems to be clearly impossible at this point, and not what anyone is arguing.
Uhhh that's not moving the goal posts except if you're starting from your own strawman. Burying gigantic amounts of plastic isn't suboptimal because humans bad/nature good/plastic ugly/etc., it's bad because of the actual effects that we're seeing in nature.
Tell me: how frequently do you think entirely new tannins are introduced to an ecosystem? How global are these new tannins introduced? Are plants suddenly producing a new tannin and spreading it across the entire globe within 50 years? Because we're producing totally new molecules in gigantic amounts and spreading them across the entire globe at a rate that is far too fast for us to even understand what the long term effects are, never mind for organisms to evolve to a new equilibrium in their presence
The lack of co-evolution is the issue. The tendency to invent, mass produce, and disseminate new molecules across the entire globe year after year at a rate much faster than evolution is the problem.
I don't know why you're harping on this "things die in nature" point. No one is disputing that.
We are still in the first million years of plastics on Earth, give it time. You'll see that after mere million years of producing plastics there won't be a new molecule introduced every decade or even every century.
And what effects are we seeing in nature because we bury plastics?
Because all the effects you are talking about near as I can tell is because we aren’t burying all the plastics. We dispose of them in other ways, or don’t at all.
Because when they’re buried, they don’t interact with anything anymore.